What Business Owners Can Learn From the Hawaii Missile Incident

On January 13th, the residents of Hawaii received an emergency incoming missile alert.

It took authorities 38 minutes to send a follow-up message explaining that it was a false alarm.

This incident, which left over a million people in a complete state of panic for almost an hour, begs the question how could this happen? And why did it take so long to correct the colossal mistake?

Surely, sending an emergency missile alert to an entire state requires several verification steps. Or, at the very least, there’s a concrete plan for the unlikely event that the alert was sent by mistake.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the reality as authorities attributed the mistake to a worker pushing the wrong button during a routine test and they hadn’t planned on what to do in case of a false alarm.

This incident was a stark reminder of what can happen when the technologies we use on a daily basis are not protected against inevitable human error.

As authorities in Hawaii reevaluate their internal processes, it’s a good time to ask whether you have processes in place around your business to prevent a small mistake from becoming a huge disaster.

Back. It. Up.

What would you do if all of your blog posts were suddenly deleted? Or you hire someone to do customizations to your website that end up breaking your theme? How long would it take you to recover those business assets?

Digital Files: Get in the habit of creating a digital copy of important paper documents. You can even use free apps like Adobe Scan to do the job. The easiest place to store your digital files is in cloud-based file storage such as Dropbox or Google Drive. Digital photos from your phone and computer can easily be saved to Google Photos. For very large files, such as video and audio, you might want to invest in an external hard drive.

Website/Store: This is often the backbone of your business. If your website or online store is down, your revenue will likely take a hit. There’s a number of ways that human error can wreck havoc on your site or online store: an app integration going wrong, messy theme code, accidentally deleting files, etc. In most cases, a backup is the only thing that can get your site back up and running in minutes.

Accounting Data/Receipts: You don’t realize what a nightmare it is to lose something as simple as who owes you money until you have to rebuild that data for the last couple of months. Get in the habit of backing up accounting data at least once a week and instead of stuffing receipts in a box, use apps like Shoeboxed to convert them into digital files.

Keep your passwords off post-it notes

A photo from the Hawaii emergency agency resurfaced online during the recent news in which a password can be seen written on a post-it note, prompting even more questions around the agency’s security practices. Needless to say, don’t keep your password written in plain view and follow password security best practices:

Don’t reuse the same password for all your accounts

Better yet, use a password manager to create unique, secure passwords for you

Enable two-factor authentication (2FA) when possible

Conclusion

As Ben Hyman, co-founder of Revival Rugs, learned the hard way: “All it takes is seconds for a business to fall apart, followed by days – even weeks – needed to pick up and put back together all of the pieces.” Don’t wait for disaster to strike to start thinking about how to handle a disaster.

Following the guidelines outlined in this post, you’ll be prepared to quickly recover from a data disaster and significantly reduce the chance that a small human error can completely derail your business.